Begin Again with Davina McCall - Begin Again Moments: Psychedelics

Episode Date: April 19, 2026

These are just two powerful moments from full Begin Again episodes. Want the full story? You can watch and listen to the complete conversations on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. In this eye-opening episode, Eleanor Mills shares her deeply personal experience with psilocybin, exploring how a guided psychedelic retreat helped her confront fear, let go of the past, and rediscover a sense of connection and purpose. From moments of surrender to profound emotional breakthroughs, Eleanor reflects on how the experience reshaped her understanding of herself and the world around her. Joining the conversation, Professor David Nutt, one of the world’s leading experts on neuroscience and psychedelics, breaks down the science behind hallucinogens. He challenges common misconceptions, explains why substances like psilocybin are classified the way they are, and reveals their potential to treat conditions such as depression and PTSD. Together, they explore the line between stigma and science, risk and healing, asking whether psychedelics could play a transformative role in mental health and personal growth. The full episode with Eleanor Mills can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsxiUp6fV_4&t=2079s The full episode with Professor David Nutt can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e82IejQ3tEI Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Just before I was made redundant from The Sunday Times, I had been on a retreat in Jamaica where I'd taken some magic mushrooms. And during, it was a kind of therapeutic retreat. It wasn't just like taking them for larks. It was medicine. It was seen as a medicine where you could learn from it. It was a probably spiritual journey where you were going into taking the magic mushrooms, asking it some questions, and you do three heroic doses in a week. And they call them heroic doses because they were. want you to reach that point of kind of singularity where your ego does that mean the amount so it's

quite a lot heroic dose is really going to be so i took eight grams of psilocybin um and you know then i know and everyone was doing that too so it was a it was a lot and what it did was it kind of on the last day they said um you know take away throw away everything you don't you no longer need in your life um and all kind of blow it up and i and i I had the sense of completely melting, when I took the mushrooms, I had the sense of completely kind of melting into a golden. It was like being, at the time I described as being like in a big bowl of golden cream. And I felt like I'd been recharged by the universe with this kind of golden light. And what I came out of the trip with was just this really strong sense of the possibility of

renewal and reinvention at this point. And I came out of it with a sense. that that was what I wanted to do, that I wanted to help people to catalyve that change. Would you mind if I asked you a bit more about that retreat? Because I think there might be lots of people watching who have no idea about what magic mushrooms do, what a retreat would be like.

Had you ever had experience of that before? Well, I'd taken loads of ecstasy and stuff back in the ages. Yeah, you know, back in the day. Back in the day. Back in day. We did it. We all did our like jumping around. I did a lot of jumping around in field.

We were doing it together. Exactly. We were the rave generation. So, yeah, back in the 90s, I did my hands in the air. But not since then, at work and everything. Not really. And I'd always been scared of taking acid. So we took EE and that kind of thing.

But not hallucinogen. No, hallucinogens seemed a bit scary. We were really brought up with, you know, we had Zamo just say no, didn't we, on stuff. Yes, totally. And then we had on acid. Everyone said if you took acid, you'd try to jump out of a window. Yeah, you jump out of a window and think you could fly. So I was like, I don't think I want to do that.

So, but you went from nothing to Hero Dose in Jamaica. Yeah, I went with a friend who'd had really bad PTSD and she wanted to go because she'd read the Michael Pollan book How to Change Your Mind, which is all about the kind of amazing documentary, isn't it? Incredible documentary, which people should watch on Netflix, which is basically the book kind of in film version. But he talks about the what actually the neuroscience

of the psilocybin, which is the active bit of magic mushrooms does and your brain. And I talked to a lot of neuroscientists about it as a good journalist. And what they say about it is it's a bit of. Like if you're going skiing and there were really deep ruts in the snow because it's all been carved up and there hadn't been safe for a while, what the taking the psilocybin does is it kind of like a fresh fall of snow and it allows you to create new parts in your brain.

That's a brilliant. Which I think is a really clever way of describing it. It really stuck with me. And so it's very good for people. If you're in PTSD, you're kind of stuck in grooves or it's good for people who are anorexic or obsessive-compulsive or depressed where their brain has got into it. deep grooves. And this just allows you, and when you see it under, under brain scanners, you can see new connections being made because it takes off line something, the default mode

network, which is the front bit of your brain, which basically tries to control everything all the time. And it allows your brain to make new connections. So I think it's a really worthwhile thing for people to do at this point. And it is quite scary, but I think if you go and do it in a therapeutic way, and what they have is they have what they call trip-sitters or psychedelic ninjas who are with you all the time, who are there to kind of be as your guardian angels. And you do it, so they talk about set and setting. So you do it in a very careful place where you can't jump off a balcony and somebody kind of looks after you. But I think what it allows you to do is to really kind of reset your sense of yourself.

And for me, it opened me up to a whole kind of spiritual aspect of the world, which I think I'd been very resistant to. So because what I find interesting is that you're not somebody who would naturally go out and seek narcotics. No. But this was something completely different. And I think it is worth knowing for people. Obviously it's not legal here. But in Jamaica it is legal. But in Jamaica it is.

They never got around to making it illegal. And so you can, you know, you can do it there. But if you're going to go and do it, I would really recommend doing it under controlled conditions because it can be quite frightening. And you want to be in a situation where you can completely surrender to what you're being shown. And that capacity to kind of open up, I mean, I've done it a few times since. And every time I've been shown something which is then maybe I didn't even understand in the moment, which has gone on to be what Coleridge or Wordsworth would describe as a vivifying virtue, which is, i.e. it kind of stokes your capacity for kind of joy or aliveness in your life afterwards.

So how long did the effects of that trip stay with you? Did they expand and grow? I think they're still with me. Wow. And actually quite a lot of research which they've done in America shows that for a lot of people there, they put this experience of having done psilocybin up there with like giving birth or getting married, that it can be completely transformational in terms of how you see yourself and your place in the world. And for me, it gave me a great sense of connectedness.

everything, the sense of a life force chugging through me, but also through the insects and the trees and the waves and the sunshine and just feeling linked to it all, what I discovered was having been glimps, had been given a glimpse of that sense of connectedness and goldenness, I could find it again without the mushrooms. You could recall it. I could recall it. So it really, I started meditating and I would think about the golden light and the light that I'd seen through the waves or that sense of connectedness.

And I could find my way back to that place through meditation. And I did silent retreats. And I've done kind of, I've done all sorts of silent retreats. How did you do that? I decided I quite like my silent self because you stop, you stop telling yourself stories. You stop having to tell a story about yourself all the time. And everything becomes quite still. Quite like silent everyone.

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day, Roja or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea and milk. Habaniero, more like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. So I just want to get on to Magic Mushrooms because we were talking about that being put in class A. Yes. And I was absolutely astonished to see LSD and mushrooms right at the bottom.

Mushrooms being the least risky or causes the least harm. That's it. The least harmful to you and to society. In fact, I think would I be right in saying no harm to yourself? Well, no, nothing is completely harmless. As I like to point out, between about five and ten people a year in Britain, die of water poisoning which drink so much.

But at least a million people a year are using mushrooms. The government's own data going about the last 20 years says there might have been one death. Right. That's just a pretty, you know, tiny, tiny, if you take that as obviously the most serious arm. Some people have panic attacks, some people get anxious as it isn't enjoying the trip.

But the thing is they're intending to be used once, two, twice, three, four times a year. So you don't get dependent. And if you don't like them, you don't use them. That's why the safety is proven by this very, very wide use. The first clinical study we did with silocybin, which is the active ingredient, magic mushroom juice. The first scientifically study we did, we started in 2012. And To get a clinical study approved, you have to go to an organization called the MHRA, the medicines and healthcare regulator of therapy. And we'd like to do this study. And they said, well, how do you know that side of sight is safe?

Because you haven't done any animal research, you know, typically drugs, you've got to do animal research, toxicology. And we said, well, no, we're an academic group. And we kept forward to too fast. And actually, I don't think we need to because we, you know, we know from your own government data. million people a year using it without harm. He said, okay, that seems sensible. Is it quite hard because psilocybin is a class A drug to get any research done? Or is it becoming easier?

Is it? It's still a nightmare. It's got worse. Theresa May, I think, was angry that we started doing this research. And then she brought in an extra level of regulation. But let me just tell you, before I get on to her, let me tell you at the beginning. So in 2012, to study side of side. we have to write a grant.

We got a grant from the medical research council in Britain. You know, it's a pioneer a lot of medical studies. And I was surprised because, you know, it's, I think this is quite radical, you know, illegal. And why do we get it? We got it because they made out a special call for helping people who depression was not responding to conventional treatments. So we said what we think based on brains, science. and also based on what some of the healthy volunteers have told us, psilocybin will improve mood.

So we got the grant. It was a three-year grant. It took a year to get ethics approval. The ethics committee said, well, it's far too dangerous to kill psilocybin to depress people. We said, why? And they said, well, they might go mad. And I said, no, no, people, they might kill themselves. The third time I sat in this ethics committee,

and I thought, if they said no, no, It's gone. So they said, okay, well, look, what do you want? And they said, well, you have to do a safety study. And that means you have to give it to 12 people and then follow them up for six months. And if they don't die, then you can do a proper status, controlled study. But I thought, we have to say yes, because otherwise we wouldn't do anything. So we said yes, okay.

So the main outcome for the first study was whether they lived or died was they all lived. And the secondary outcome was their move. But that was easy a bit. That's getting the drug, this controlled class A, so you're one drug. There's only one place we could find in the world that would make it. It took 32 months. No.

Of a 36-month grant. Just to get it? To get it. Oh, my God. I mean, and that's all because, well, it's very dangerous, right, isn't it? I had to have a special safe, put in my office, bolted to the floor and the wall, with a camera, to make sure I wasn't going in there and licking the left muchrooms.

And I said to the, hang on, guys, there's a pharmacy here that's got heroin and fentanyl. Why can't I just put it there? And they said, oh, no, no, because there was a schedule two. This is a schedule one. I mean, if anyone's going to break in, they're not going to steal washrooms. I kind of file aside, but they're going to steal it. But is this kind of unthought, you know, the perverse consequences, regulation.

So you know that to be true now, that psilocybin can help treat depression? Yeah. It's... We've done two studies. Not only have we done studies showing it treats depression that other treatments don't work for, but it works in a very different way in the brain. It's actually another way of lifting compression. It's an alternative.

I mean, it's quite, I think that's quite important, really. If you got high blood pressure, it's... you've got a choice of five different kinds of ways of lowering your web pressure. And if one doesn't work, the other might. For depression and two psychedelics, you have one or ECT, which most people don't want. Now you've got two, and they work in different parts of the brain, on different receptors, at different speeds, psychedelics work almost immediately. So they're potentially transformational.

But we can use them genetically, except in research. And so we can only treat people who are in a study. And people, well, we haven't got money to keep. You can't keep doing studies because you know the answer. So you've got to change the regulations and get it to more people. I saw something where somebody had cancer. It was a young man. And he was really struggling with leaving his wife and child.

And he talked through this experience that he'd had where he turned into a tree and his kid and his wife. thought past and touched him and that it helped him so much realised that he would still be there even when he'd gone. That is what... I mean, historically, psychedelics were often used

to help people come to terms with death and dying. I mean, it... Generally not known, but... But, Huxley, you know, the great intellect, the great writer of... about a psychedelic thing. He... His partner gave him LSD as he died

because heaven And to me, that's actually something I think should be available to anyone at once. And they're having studies now. There have been two control studies done in the States, people with terminal illnesses like motor neurone disease or cancer, and who've been given sinusine, you know, and it's helped them come to terms of the dying for the exact reason you elucidated there. Under psychedelics, you see that you are part of the U.S. universe, but under psychedelics, you see there are much bigger people often talk about their

bodies of atomizing and they're going into another universe, another place often just somewhere like heaven or a mountain. And that realization that, you know, you never disappear. And I suppose it's sort of bit back to the old, you know, sort of Christian thing, you know, we come from the ground and we go, well, we don't, we never, we don't completely die. We just, we configure somehow. And that people find that really quite reassuring.